


Hall of Broken Mirrors

by SimplexityJane



Series: Resistance [5]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Actual canonical characters this time, F/M, Laying Bricks, Oh Background Sweet Background
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-31
Updated: 2015-01-31
Packaged: 2018-03-09 18:50:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,822
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3260609
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SimplexityJane/pseuds/SimplexityJane
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Audrey Hadley organizes a non-wizard support group. She would like to remind everyone that yes, she is in fact still non-wizard, and anyone who attempts to call her a Muggle will get a curse in a sensitive area, and don't ask her how she learned it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hall of Broken Mirrors

**Author's Note:**

> More background. Mentions of past child abuse. Audrey being more than a footnote in a family tree.

The first meeting of Non-Wizard Family Support was going well, Audrey thought sitting next to Thomas Finch-Fletchley. Sure, there was a small fire, and three quarters of the people here were ready to shoot the rest, who were more the kind of people who had hit Audrey when she’d said she thought Ally Sheedy was beautiful at the tender age of four. She was ready to shoot them, come to think of it, but her mum had taught her to be polite when people were being idiots. Since Anita Hadley had a habit of haranguing people into agreeing with her, she was a bit of a hypocrite, but Audrey thought she’d had very sound advice.

“Everyone who hates their magical child can leave, and you’ll be sure to receive an investigation by the NSPCC, and you _will_ find your children taken away, even the ones who haven’t shown themselves to be magical yet. Clearly you can’t be trusted with any children, if them being different matters to you so fucking much.”

“You can’t do that,” one of the idiots said, and Audrey sighed. She looked at Thomas, who smiled, and turned back to him.

“You will recall that child abuse is a crime, Mr. Fitzherbert, and at least half the people in this room were witness to _you_ calling your son a freak of nature. That sort of thing constitutes the less well-known phenomenon of verbal abuse, and is illegal. Now, let us talk about something else since we’ve decided on a course of action for the troublesome people in the room, who should remember that _they_ chose to have children, not the other way around.”

Since Mum wasn’t here, Audrey would have to fill her shoes. She wished she could hit people with a book and make them better for it, though, but for now she’d have to go to Mum, and tell her about the abusive behavior she saw.

Mum sighed, of course, because there wasn’t much they could do since so few people knew about magic. She touched the picture of Cory, who had been laughing like a fiend that day because he had turned Audrey’s hair bright green on _purpose_.

“I’d take some of them, but I’m a student. Even if they’d _let_ me take care of them, I wouldn’t be able to.”

“We’ll find a way, Audrey. Every child deserves a safe, loving home.”

That had led Anita Hadley to take in first one, then multiple children, all of them loved and, most of all, safe. Cory, the wizard of the family, was just the youngest.

They found a way, though it was hard. The wizarding world supposedly existed within the rule of British Law, which meant a lot of things that they refused to acknowledge, and Mum worked to try to force them into it. Cory came home from school with books about magic, and Audrey read those on top of the ones that she believed contained truth, though in a strange form.

“I’m learning to tell the future,” Thomas said, and Audrey didn’t tell him how she’d had Mum request books from Hogwarts Library through Snape on ancient types of magic, how she thought that some of the reasons the magic had ceased to exist was because the non-wizards who had access to it had died out. _The Mystery of the Mirror_ had been a favorite, one she’d scanned onto regular paper in defiance of the “truth” that magic and electronics didn’t work together.

If radio waves worked – and they did – then every other technology should work.

And it did. Sometimes the _magic_ changed, but the technology still worked, and that was amazing.

“I’m teaching a girl at my flat how to read tea leaves,” Audrey countered, and Thomas frowned. They had been in a constant competition to one up each other with magic, which she’d consistently beaten him at. She was fairly certain he was flirting with her, but she wasn’t interested in him, not if what she was reading about mirror magic was true. “She’s better at it than I am, now.”

Which made sense, since she was researching magic that wouldn’t allow her to use tea leaves anymore, but would be necessary if what Cory was writing to them about – and, increasingly, what Snape was writing Mum about tensions – was true.

At the end of his Second Year Cory came back pale, and scared, and he brought a whole other _family_ with him.

“I’m Percy,” the one in horn-rimmed glasses said, shaking Audrey’s hand. The identical fiends behind him were grinning at her hair, and took her hands like they were going to shake them off.

“Fred, and this is George, and since you’re our cousin, sort of, tell us one thing.”

“How’d you get your hair so bright without potions?”

Audrey smiled at them, and then Percy, who blushed bright red. White boys did that very easily, she’d found, especially redheaded ones.

“My friend Mandy could help you with that, actually,” she said. “I can give you her number – just, don’t shout. The phone sends a signal that makes it like you’re standing next to a person. Okay?”

“Right-o!”

“Smashing!”

Audrey was used to a loud house. She and Mum adapted, even if Cory didn’t really want to. He was twelve, and stubborn, and  a Hufflepuff where every Weasley – and Prewett, which was the side he was related to – was a Gryffindor.

“They’re prats, and they don’t understand what war is,” he said in one of their letters. “They _hissed_ at a little Slytherin just because she was Sorted there.”

Audrey sent them dual Howlers whose messages were so complex that if the timing was off on one of them then it would just be noise. Percy helped her with it, and she hoped his family understood what he was doing, working his way up in the Ministry like a good little boy while helping her with preparations on a settlement in the heart of London and arranging transport of non-wizards and wizards into the country, all while pretending to be an idiot.

“I want to survive,” he said, drinking her beer while they went over plans. “I want my family to survive, and I want to survive. Is that wrong?”

Audrey kissed him, even though he was younger than her and a wizard and didn’t _know_ why she always had to stand out. He was a Gryffindor, so he kissed back, even though it wasn’t, really, an earth-shattering kiss. It got better, though, and it was hard to stop, really, even though they were in the middle of a war that they were vastly underprepared for.

She told him about the mirror magic later that night, and he was sober enough to understand what she was doing.

“Someone is going to have to hurt you for you to get these spells,” he said, their fingers twined together. “That’s what that means?”

“I had Cory cast Cheering Charms on me already, and I made Mum laugh for a full five minutes. I can also shift things, the temperature in a room – the magic is reflected, not necessarily the same thing it was. But yes, someone will have to hurt me if I want to fight in the war. And I do, Percy. I’m not a soldier’s wife, and I never will be. I’m a soldier, just like you, and if I can fight like this, this is how I do it.”

It hurt, training, and the final test – that winding corridor that was her own mind, her own willpower demanding that she be the first of many, _again_ – almost killed her.

In the end, though, magic was hers, and it was the most fantastic thing in the world.

“I can’t help with the construction, but the wards on the town, they’ll have to be mine,” she told the Weasley twins, who nodded over their maps of the area they wanted to turn into a refuge. “They have to be something that no wizard can understand, so no wizard can combat them.”

In the end it was the magic of a Fidelius, cast so that Audrey was Secret Keeper for Snape, who was on their side but _couldn’t_ be discovered, that she felt pour over the still-empty homes and houses. Light magic in her fingers, turning this place nearly Unplottable, and with enough protection on it that even putting a curse on the name Voldemort wouldn’t break them.

“We are so incredibly fucked if you die, you know” Thomas said, and Audrey knew he was right. She just didn’t have time to worry about that, what with refugees pouring in starting the day after Albus Dumbledore was murdered, non-wizard families bringing their wizarding children to her and asking for her protection because _no one_ else would give it.

“We would both have been Sorted into Slytherin, you know,” she said. It was true, and it made him choke on his pie. Mrs. Weasley had made it for him, since her family had decided that one of them needed to keep an eye on Cory and she knew spells that would help Audrey with domestic things, things that she wasn’t good at.

“Blasphemy,” he coughed. “Sheer, utter blasphemy.”

“Your mouth says blasphemy, but your eyes say I got to you, because it’s true. So, are you going to learn mirror magic or am I going to have to find someone else to teach everything I know?”

Thomas shook his head, hand twitching towards the runes in his pocket. Wizards had runes too, but most of them weren’t for doing readings. That was non-wizard magic, and very few wizards could use magic the way they did, leading to the absurd thought that foretelling the future was _fake_ magic.

“I like my magic being like a bell, Audrey. I like knowing that my children are probably going to be wizards, not half one thing and half another. So, I’d suggest finding someone who loves magic enough to forget how you screamed when they cast a Severing Curse at you.”

Audrey wanted to remind him that now she could open up a man’s insides without him knowing about it, that she could project a shield over clothing, that she could _see_ magic. He wanted power, which was why he’d started with the non-wizard magic in the first place. He didn’t like pain, but he would endure it if she told him what this power was like.

The magic stopped her. It demanded willingness, utter obedience, and she’d given it. Thomas never would, and he would die.

It was as simple as that.

They would go to war with the willing, or not at all.

She just hoped they didn’t all die in a blaze of glory, because she really wanted to take Percy up on his proposal. He would look fantastic in a suit, and she had no doubt he’d laugh when she wore one too.


End file.
